The Dobbs Decision, Forced Birth, and the Fantasy of the Selfless Mother

Abstract

The Dobbs decision and the U.S. abortion ban, or forced birth, is a clear human rights violation. With zero access to safe abortion, a pregnant person must either stay pregnant and give birth to a child they may not want, or put the child up for adoption. This will disproportionately affect already marginalized people and communities managing systemic racism. And it is forcing pregnant people with the life-changing responsibility of caring for all unwanted, unplanned children—whether they want to or not. How will this affect the life and trajectory of the person giving birth? How will the unaborted infant receive the necessary love and attention to grow and thrive? While legislation can impose forced birth, it cannot enforce the conditions of love and care. The Supreme Court majority’s ideal or fantasy of the selfless mother is a disembodied dissociated version of motherhood– an image of a mother–living unwittingly in the shadows of cultural expectation and intergenerational patterns of maternal silence. With the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court has enshrined the idealized fantasy of the selfless mother into law.

Keywords:

• abortion
• forced birth
• legacy of silence
• women
• selfless mother
• Dobbs
• Roe
• idealized mother

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Meredith Darcy

Meredith Darcy, LCSW-R, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and Dobbs Ferry, NY. She is President of the Board for Section III: Women, Gender and Psychoanalysis of Div. 39: Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology; faculty and supervisor at The Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology; and associate editor for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She was awarded the 2018 Lawrence Kaufman Award for her paper “The case of Cora: Psychotic anxieties, containment, and the role of group supervision” and authored the chapter “Too warm, too soft, too maternal: What is good Enough” in the 2017 Routledge book, A Womb of Her Own: Women’s Struggle for Sexual and Reproductive Autonomy (E. Toronto et al.). Her paper “Spicy Inside-Out Roll: Dealing with Revulsion in the Analytic Space” was featured in chapter 7 of Joseph Newirth’s book From Sign to Symbol (Lexington Books, 2018). Much of her practice, and writing, focus on exploring gender identity and expectation, sexuality, the body, attachment, and the development of the self.